Kevin Smith on 'Red State', His Creepy New Horror Film

Kevin Smith has been out and about promoting his new horror film, Red State, out on DVD yesterday. The movie stars John Goodman and Melissa Leo, and generated a lot of buzz at this year's Sundance festival.

With his self-imposed retirement from filmmaking looming on the horizon, Smith has been talking about making the films he really wants to make, which apparently includes a horror film inspired by an interview with the devil himself, Westborough Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps.

He tells NYMag.com about where the idea for the film came from:

I'd seen my friend Malcolm Ingram's documentary Small Town Gay Bar, which doesn't bury its lead -- it's right there in the title. In it, one of the bars depicted is in Viridian, Mississippi, and that's where Fred Phelps is from. So Malcolm sits down and interviews Fred Phelps, which is five minutes of the doc... And maybe it's because I was so close to the screen and because all the lights were off and shit and the conditions for watching it were perfect -- but it was creepy and unsettling.